Dead Internet Theory
May. 20th, 2026 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThe Feed Is Fake: That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260515113210/https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html
Here's the first paragraph:
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.
Here's the final paragraph:
The good news is that this will all be over soon, according to Lim, because something worse is coming to replace it. He recently shut down Floodify after trying to scale too fast and falling behind on deliverables. At one point, the company accidentally posted the same video to 7,000 accounts, which got them all banned. But he wasn’t discouraged. When we last spoke, he was building a new company and thinking even further ahead. “All of this nonsense is only going to last three to five more years, because in the future, people will stop trusting what they see on social media.” By then, the job will have moved one layer up. “You’ll have to start distributing your content toward AI agents and then they’ll teach humans what they want.”
See also this recent post about inauthentic user activity on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1tbzgda/whats_going_on_with_rconservative_theyve_lost/
TLDR: All of this news broke in the past week, but I've been feeling it since around 2023 or so. What happens is that there's a genuine concern in the culture that gets blown wildly out of proportion by inauthentic user activity and then picked up by traditional media outlets. This is one of the main reasons why I no longer share political posts or contribute to what might be considered "culture war" discourse on social media. I participated in these sorts of online conversations in the 2010s, but at this point it feels deeply irresponsible. Idk man. It's a difficult situation.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260515113210/https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html
Here's the first paragraph:
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.
Here's the final paragraph:
The good news is that this will all be over soon, according to Lim, because something worse is coming to replace it. He recently shut down Floodify after trying to scale too fast and falling behind on deliverables. At one point, the company accidentally posted the same video to 7,000 accounts, which got them all banned. But he wasn’t discouraged. When we last spoke, he was building a new company and thinking even further ahead. “All of this nonsense is only going to last three to five more years, because in the future, people will stop trusting what they see on social media.” By then, the job will have moved one layer up. “You’ll have to start distributing your content toward AI agents and then they’ll teach humans what they want.”
See also this recent post about inauthentic user activity on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1tbzgda/whats_going_on_with_rconservative_theyve_lost/
TLDR: All of this news broke in the past week, but I've been feeling it since around 2023 or so. What happens is that there's a genuine concern in the culture that gets blown wildly out of proportion by inauthentic user activity and then picked up by traditional media outlets. This is one of the main reasons why I no longer share political posts or contribute to what might be considered "culture war" discourse on social media. I participated in these sorts of online conversations in the 2010s, but at this point it feels deeply irresponsible. Idk man. It's a difficult situation.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-20 01:35 pm (UTC)I also have completely backed out of political/pop culture discussions. It used to be fun to air things out with strangers on forums. But now you can't even be sure you're talking to a real person. It's one of the things that are pushing me back to sites like Dreamwidth, but it doesn't really solve much. Most people are not even aware of the manipulation--much less how deep it goes. It's depressing.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-20 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-20 04:49 pm (UTC)